P.S. Overall quality of the reproductions is quite poor, so you’ll have a vague idea of her images. This is something quite common among Italian contemporary photographers - most part of those who don’t do editorial run away from the idea of putting their work online. Why having a website in Italy generally should not fit with a career in the fine arts world?

If you have nothing better to do (like me today, maybe), a great way to spend your time is to take a look at Christie’s past auctions of photographs. Let’s take the three obvious examples of living photographers with astronomical quotations: Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Hiroshi Sugimoto. But if we move to, say, Damien Hirst, then we realize that photography is still a long way to the true world of the incomprehensible. Ah, was almost forgetting Richard Prince...

What perhaps catches my attention the most in the work of French photographer Adrien Missika is the structure behind many of his series, often made of few images. And these images show us strange worlds, weird versions of our own, artificial landscapes made of a fabric we can somehow feel, places and structures with an obscure function we cannot comprehend.The single image is conceived as a work in itself, and then as part of a body of work – and this is something always welcome in photography.Check out also the longest series shown on his website, images from the book Teen Jail.

- Let’s go back to daguerreotype to mention the work of Mark Kessel, an Australian physician who turned to the photographic art. His work deals with ‘the development of personality, the lifecycle of the human species and, most recently our biological and emotional relationship to animals’. To me, his silver plates look like the archives of a distant past, oscure (and often pretty scary) collections of objects and life forms that seem to belong to another world. The aesthetic of the daguerreotype fits perfectly with his subjects, as if we were looking at the strange and sometimes disturbing records of an unknown science.

- David Prifti (found via Conscientious) uses the wet plate collodion technique to create his beautiful series of portraits, landscapes and still lives. Check out also his links to see other people’s work and more websites about alternative photography.

Mike Mandel (for those who might still not know him, start here) made in 1975The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, a photo offset lithographic project portraying photographers like baseball players on trading cards(Ansel Adams, Joel Meyerowitz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lewis Baltz, etc), with a personal profile on the back of the cards.

‘The project satirized the phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture’, wrote Mandel.

Anonymous, Dog Smoking a Pipe, from Early Visual Media. Some retro-link for today, since we haven’t been posting about it in a while:

1) Europa Film Treasures is a recent online project, a collection that allows free streaming of films starting from the early years of cinema, joining the films of many different national archives.

A good start could be the Austraian 1908 short “At The Photographer’s”, the tribulations of a photographer whose sole pur pose is to undress his models.

2) Early Visual Media is a website devoted to the first stirrings of all kinds of visual technologies, from photography to television.

3) Institute for Concrete Matter administers the Troost/Krantz photo-collection, which consists of over 40,000 photographs covering 19th and 20th century, with an emphasis on anonymous and applied forms of photography.

Los Angeles, city lights, helicopters, police, screams, subtitles:Seeker, “a little videopoem”, by videoartist and photographer Johnna MacArthur.Here you can find a gallery of images from her portrait project I & Thou.

“I ask my subjects to look at me when the shutter is released. This is done not only to eliminate a mirror-like relationship between their gaze and the camera’s lens but also to request a commitment to the moment of seeing one another and to the camera as our witness. The result is a self-portrait, a portrait of I and thou”.

This is what Time wrote on December 1960 about Stanley Marcus, the man who made the success of the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus.A few years after his death in 2002, daughter Jerrie Marcus and granddaughter Allison V. Smith made a book with a selection from the 6000 photographs he took during his life,Reflection of a man. The result is a fascinating sequence of swimming pools, people smiling, latest trends in gadgets and clothes, vintage objects (retrospectively, of course), but also a truly interesting vision, with a strong taste of Lartigue: they were both ultra-rich, after all…A Flickr set of images by Marcus here, and a booktease here.